Whilst plastic recycling has significant room for improvement, Aluminium recycling is a mature industry, with a rate of over 90% in some countries, and around 75% of all aluminium production still in use. Norwegian Aluminium producers Hydro are pioneers when it comes to recycled aluminium with their CIRCAL aluminium made from 75% recycled aluminium.
Asle Forsbak, Communication Director at Hydro also notes the need for collaboration, highlighting the role that designers have to play.
“Designers can sometimes make our lives very difficult. If product materials cannot be separated when they are at their end of life, then they are not really circular. Our biggest struggle now is to get enough used aluminium scrap that is possible to recycle. There is enough scrap out there, but finding reusable scrap is really the challenge. If every product was well designed, to be easily dismantled sorted and recycled and we could reuse almost all of it.”
This blending of materials is no more apparent than in the textile industry, the biggest industry in the world. Frode Svarstad is a Textile Engineer at Gudbrandsdalens Uldvarefabrik, who mainly specialise in wool:
“The textile industry is huge and whilst wool represents about only 1%, we still want to recycle more of the wool based material in our mills, but it has to be collected and separated and organised. If it they are blended with other fibre types then it’s impossible to separate them. And whilst some blending is for technical reasons, to make a stronger yarn, for example, the other reason is for appearance.”
This can often be the biggest challenge when it comes to making sustainable choices – the choice of the consumer. However, the tide is turning.
Asle: “As a company, we have taken sustainability seriously for a long time now. It has been our position even before any of our customers asked for it, because we saw that this would be a global trend going forward. We have so many examples over the past few years now that big and small companies see that the final consumers demand so much more from the sustainability profile of a product, which makes our recycled aluminium very attractive to manufacturers.”
Frode: “Sustainability has been in our genes since the beginning. Based on Norwegian wool originally, using clean water, all processes in-house, and clean electricity. We started with iso 1401 in 1995 perhaps it was important for us, but too early for the market to realise it. In 1995, our customers didn’t want to pay extra for that. But today? We are increasingly aware that our customers are appreciating our eco-products, and we are seeing a lot more cooperation.”